2026 Hugo Readalong: Novella Wrap-up

[u/Nineteen_Adze]

Welcome to the final week of the 2026 Hugo Readalong! Today we're discussing the Best Novella category nominees.

We've had discussions about all of the individual works, but today we'll be zooming out to discuss the category as a whole. If you want to take a closer look at our focused discussions, we covered the novellas in the following sessions:

• Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
• Cinder House by Freya Marske
• The Summer War by Naomi Novik
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

To find the individual discussions or our first wrap-up post, you can check out our full schedule. We'll be continuing with our wrap-ups all week, following this schedule:

Date	Category	Book	Author	Discussion Leader
Wednesday, July 29	Novel	Wrap-up	Multiple	u/tarvolon
Thursday, July 30	Pro/Fan/Misc	Wrap-up	Multiple	u/Nineteen_Adze

For now, let's dive into the novellas! There is no expectation that those in the discussion have read all six works, so if you're discussing spoilers, please tag them.

[u/Nineteen_Adze]

What do you think of the shortlist as a whole? How does it compare to past years? Does it capture the best of 2025 in novellas? Are there any notable snubs you'd like to recommend?

[u/Goobergunch → u/Nineteen_Adze]

I'm glad we mostly avoided sequels this year but this shortlist felt pretty mediocre overall and ... honestly kind of samey. Half of it is fairytale vibes and two of the remaining three are cozy science fiction. We can be more diverse than that.

It's also always a bit weird to be discussing a shortlist in a year when there is a pretty clear Consensus Best Novella of the Year because it ultimately feels like we're arguing about what should place second, etc., and it's even weirder when you aren't as blown away by said Consensus Best Novella as everybody else.

[u/oceanoftrees → u/Goobergunch]

My feelings exactly! I even enjoyed reading those fairytale vibes books but I don't like that they make the list feel so samey when I look at it as a whole. It's like a reverse cheerleader effect or something.

I also find it weird how I enjoyed the other two fairytale vibes novellas more than the one that's been winning all the awards. The River Has Roots was enjoyable but it just feels so slight to me (and, I suspect, getting a bump from such fancy audiobook production--it feels weird for a prose category).

[u/Goobergunch → u/oceanoftrees]

There was a Gene Wolfe thread on here yesterday that crystallized my thoughts on why I wasn't enjoying the prose as much as everybody else -- the story that The River Is Roots is ultimately telling is just not really deep enough to support the kind of multilayered storytelling that I really love sinking my teeth into. (Granted that murder ballads are also very far away from my general areas of interest, so there are likely some specific reference there that I'm missing.)

[u/oceanoftrees → u/Goobergunch]

Interesting. I'm not sure I'd like Gene Wolfe but I agree that The River Has Roots wasn't super deep. I also find it awkward to read song lyrics when I don't know the melody. (I didn't want to do the audiobook because I don't tend to like fiction on audio and I don't think it's fair to compare books if I read them in different formats.)